Against Celsus 7.5

Moreover, if it is believed not only among Christians and Jews but also among many others, Greeks and barbarians, that the human soul lives and exists after its separation from the body, and reason shows that the pure soul, not weighed down by the leaden weights of wickedness, is borne aloft to the regions of the purer and ethereal bodies, leaving behind the gross bodies here and the defilements in them, while the evil soul, dragged down to the earth by its sins and unable even to recover its breath, is borne about and rolls about here, one around “the tombs,” where “phantoms” of shadowy souls have been seen, another simply around the earth: what kind of spirits must we think those are that are bound, so to speak, for whole ages to buildings and places, whether by certain charms or because of their own wickedness? Reason chooses to think such things are evil, using the power of foreknowledge, which is morally neutral, to deceive men and to draw them away from God and from pure piety toward him. This is shown by the fact that the same beings, whose bodies are nourished by the vapours from sacrifices and the portions taken from blood and burnt offerings, and who take pleasure in such things, come to be, as it were, in love with life, like wicked men who do not welcome the purer life outside bodies but, for the sake of bodily pleasures, cling to life in the earthly body. And if the Apollo at Delphi were a god, as the Greeks think, whom should he rather have chosen as prophet than the wise man, or, if no such man were found, at least one making progress? How would he not have preferred a man to prophesy rather than a woman? And if he wanted the female sex, being perhaps unable to find pleasure in anything else or not delighting in anything but women's parts, why should he not have chosen a virgin rather than a woman to declare his will?